|
|
Reconciliation and Life Story Narratives: Compensation and its afterlife in family memory
| In the last fourteen years, three different funds for the victims of National Socialism have been initiated by the Federal Government in Austria. Soon these measures of restitution of property and monetary compensation of losses will be concluded. My post-doc project, called ‘The Afterlife of Restitution’, is a research about the consequences of this repeated confrontation with the past for the involved people and their families. I do interviews with three-generation-families in several countries, asking for their experiences with the compensation paid from Austria and what they think about it; comparing the experiences of different generations and in different countries.
In this lecture I will relate some interview impressions from Austria, the Netherlands and Argentina (or England) to each other. I will show in which way the national setting forms the perception of compensation measures, but also how far social and political milieus, people are part of, influence their attitude towards compensation. These social factors possibly influence the attitude towards compensation more than the national context. So leading questions will be: How far is the perception of compensation formed by individual experience but also by collective memory patterns? Are there typical generation-related narratives in regard to the compensation measures and what different functions do these narratives possibly have?
|
|
|
|
